Sure Guide Through The Interior World

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - December 14, 2007

One of the most rewarding years of my life was spent in Toronto at St. Philip's Seminary. Thanks to the strict discipline of the seminary, its academic rigor and a brutally long and cold Canadian winter, I spent nine months almost exclusively indoors praying and studying. I had the chance to read the Catechism of the Catholic Church from cover to cover — three times. I plodded through St. Thomas Aquinas' entire Summa Theologiae. I read the world's greatest theology manual, Ludwig Ott's Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, twice. Huddled by heat sources in the chapel and in my room, I scrutinized more tomes on Church history, theology, philosophy, and lives of the saints in those nine months than in my other five years of priestly training combined.

The most fulfilling experience of all that year, however, was the opportunity twice to journey through the Collected Words of St. John of the Cross, whose feast day the universal Church celebrates today.

I had been making my way systematically through various spiritual classics on prayer — by Ignatius of Loyola, Francis de Sales, Josemaria, Cassian, Alphonsus Ligouri, Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, Therese Lisieux and others — all of which were very helpful in nourishing my own prayer and my understanding of the Christian life. When I finally began to read St. John of the Cross, however, I discovered more than a holy teacher of the art of prayer, but someone who spoke with unrivalled authority and immediacy to the depth of my soul. Reading him felt like I was reading God's own searingly truthful yet soothingly tender evaluation of my own soul.

Over the rest of the year, St. John of the Cross led me on the greatest adventure of my life, through the interior universe where man encounters God and finds himself. Just as in the Divine Comedy Virgil led Dante through the Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise, so John led me through the purgative, illuminative and unitive stages of prayer. His major works, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, The Dark Night, The Spiritual Canticle and The Living Flame of Love, are a sure map through the inner Himalaya of prayer. Through John's eyes and words, I was able to make a virtual pilgrimage through the deep, dark valleys of abandonment where God purifies us, to the summit of human life, prayer and love, which is transforming union with the living flame of God's love.

While I continue to stumble along that pilgrimage in real life, the knowledge of what stands before me on the journey — either in this life or in the next — spurs me on toward the summit, even though it seems sometimes so far away. Pope Benedict writes in his recent encyclical Spe Salvi that Christian hope is based on already having in the past and present some substantial foretaste of what we desire fully in the future; that hope sustains us even in the midst of terrible sufferings and difficulties. Reading St. John of the Cross provided me with this hope, because he gave me an inkling of the incredible joy that awaits the Christian who faithfully perseveres in Christian life and prayer to the end.

St. John of the Cross was able to become the Church's great cartographer of the interior world because he himself had been led by God through the all the stages of the journey. He persevered in faithful, hopeful, loving prayer despite terrible persecutions from many of his fellow 16th century Spanish Carmelites who found John's desires to live by the strict observance of the original Carmelite rule too much to handle. Out of envy and sheer wickedness, he was imprisoned, beaten, and starved by his fellow religious, and prevented even from celebrating Mass. But none of this could shake him, for even in the midst of his sufferings, he never ceased to have trust in God. He knew that the Lord was his shepherd and with him he lacked for nothing. He wrote once, in a short series of aphorisms called The Degrees of Perfection, "Remember that everything that happens to you, whether prosperous or adverse, comes from God, so that you become neither puffed up in prosperity nor discouraged in adversity." He saw that even his adverse tribulations came from God and maintained his courage to the end, where he died maltreated and abandoned by seemingly everyone but God.

The Church is called to be a "school of prayer." In this school Jesus is the Master, but John is probably his greatest teaching assistant. I hope that you will allow him to teach you.

I leave you with some of the 17 pithy Degrees of Perfection he lived and wrote for others. They are a manual in how to "put out into the deep" of prayer and the Christian life.

"Remember always that you came here for no other reason that to be a saint; thus let nothing reign in your soul that does not lead you to sanctity."

"Never give up prayer, and should you find dryness and difficulty, persevere in it for this very reason. God often desires to see what love your soul has, and love is not tried by ease and satisfaction."

"Do not commit a sin for all there is in the world, or any deliberate venial sin, or any known perfection."

"Always be more disposed toward giving to others than giving to yourself, and thus you will not be envious of or selfish toward your neighbor. This is to be understood from the viewpoint of perfection, for God is angered with those who do not give precedence to his good pleasure over that of humans. To him alone be glory and honor."

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.